‘The real generation gap is about expectations’: How retirement changes if people live to 130

The so-called “Great Wealth Transfer” from Baby Boomers to younger generations has often been presented as the simple part of retirement. The idea is straightforward: Boomers have the assets, and those assets will eventually pass down to their children.

Joe Coughlin, founder of MIT’s AgeLab in 1999, said even the size of that transfer is uncertain. In a recent interview with Fortune, he laughed at estimates that range from $36 trillion to $124 trillion.

But according to one of the leading experts on longevity, the bigger issue is timing. The usual story assumes retirement at 65 and only a limited number of years afterward, yet the 21st century appears to be rewriting that script.

The Longevity Preparedness Index (LPI), shared exclusively with Fortune before its public release by John Hancock Financial and MIT AgeLab, is designed to gauge how prepared U.S. adults are for longer lives. Americans scored 60 out of 100 this year, the same as last year, with care emerging as the weakest category.

Wayne Park, who leads John Hancock’s parent company Manulife’s U.S. retirement business, called that result a “solid D.” In a separate interview with Fortune, he said people may someday live to 130. He is not alone in that view: a University of Washington study published in 2021 estimated a 13% chance that at least one person in the 13 countries it examined would reach age 130 by 2100, while Harvard’s David Sinclair has argued that reaching 150 is not far-fetched.

Brooks Tingle, who heads John Hancock, told Fortune that age 65 as a retirement benchmark “was sort of dreamt up … when people lived to 47.” Yet societies still organize around it, which helps explain why retirement and wealth transfers are structured the way they are. Germany reduced its pension eligibility age from 70 to 65 in 1916, and the United States set 65 as the Social Security age in 1935.

Park described 65 as “sort of an artificial milestone.” He also said the Great Wealth Transfer may be “overemphasized” so far. “The facts are that one transfers first to the spouse typically,” he said. With longer life spans, the process can stretch across decades. A transfer will still happen, he said, but its scale may have been overstated.

Because women often marry men who are a few years older, Coughlin noted, many women enter a second retirement after a husband dies. “For all the kids waiting for that great check in the sky,” he said, “don’t hold your breath.”

The boomers, and who gets blamed

Coughlin examined the business effects of an aging population in his 2017 book, The Longevity Economy. He stressed that the index is not a health survey. “Health and wealth are the bookends of a longer, better life,” he said. “But in between, where are you going to live? What are you going to do? What are the transitions?” In his view, the “longevity economy” has mostly focused on extending time and managing health, which he called “not incorrect, but incomplete.”

He also described the LPI as an early map of uncharted territory. “This is the first roadmap to try to sketch out what is that terra incognita out there of living longer, better,” he said. Coughlin is writing a book about four retirements within retirement, he added, beginning with a stage of managing ambiguity, when people figure out what retirement means and whether they will keep working part time. As he outlined the later stages, it was easy to imagine entirely new life stages forming as longevity stretches the horizon.

In a recent National Association of Realtors survey, the median age of first-time homebuyers hit 40, a record high. Asked about that, Coughlin pointed to delays in other milestones, including driving, partnering and moving out. “We’re creating new life stages,” he said, “or we’re extending life stages that used to be done in short order.”

For Park, longer lives mean more years that need to be financed, increasing pressure on both Social Security and personal savings. “There’s going to be challenges because of the way our public system is set up,” he said.

When asked about generational conflict — with Boomers holding much of the housing and stock-market wealth while younger generations wait for their turn — all three argued that the issue is bigger than a simple fight over assets. They said the real story is the demands and opportunities created by longer lives.

“The real generation gap is about expectations,” Coughlin said. “Not only do expect to live longer, but they expect to live better.” He argued that Boomers were the first generation to expect both, because they saw technology transform daily life. Later generations saw even more change, making each one less willing to accept limits as fixed.

Coughlin said millennials have inherited the Boomers’ reputation without the same advantages. “You poor guys are getting treated the way the boomers did,” he said. As for Gen Z, he said he came away impressed by a generation shaped by adversity and possibly on track to become another “Greatest Generation,” like the one that fought World War II. “They’re not snowflakes. They’re snowballs,” he said. The young people he has spoken with, he added, have a rational distrust of institutions meant to protect them because they watched those institutions fail their parents and older siblings. Many have responded by building a second source of income. One, he said, told him they needed a plan B “because I’m not sure that my employer is going to be there for me.”

He was not overly optimistic about everything. Loneliness is highest among people ages 18 to 25, he said, and the quarter-life crisis is real. He also argued that social media worsens the expectations gap by encouraging constant comparison with other people’s highlight reels, while his wellbeing data shows satisfaction sliding through the 30s and 40s, bottoming out around the late 40s before rising again.

Expectations cut both ways

Park urged caution. With the pace of change in GLP-1 drugs and artificial intelligence moving so quickly, no one knows what age 130 will actually look like. “The question is, are those 130 years going to be in? You’re going to be thriving for most of those 130 years, versus what it could be,” he said.

Care received the lowest score on the index, 43, among the eight categories: community, daily activities, finance, health, home, life transitions, social connections and care. Park said the research suggests that caregiving often falls to the eldest daughter, frequently without her realizing that others already expect it. MIT AgeLab has long discussed the “eldest daughter” pattern, including research showing that 75% of unpaid caregivers are women, many of them family members.

Tingle said people unsettled by the numbers should see the added years as an opening. “You’ve got to be realistic,” he said. “Yeah, you’ve got to prepare, you’ve got to plan, but it presents a tremendous opportunity.”

Park said he has found it difficult to raise the topic at home. “I tried to have a conversation about my care,” he said. “And last year, my daughter told me she had a boyfriend and just—that didn’t happen,” he laughed, saying the discussion “went somewhere else.” He ended where the index does. “You’re going to have an awkward conversation on Thanksgiving anyway,” he said. “This is a really important one.”